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CONFERENCE INTERPRETER

The place is the Intercontinental Hotel, the time is 1 p. m., and the annual Russian Oil Industry Conference is about to break for lunch. Cathy Ganson, who is interpreting from Russian into English, speaks into the microphone.

"If there are no more questions, we'll stop for lunch." From the window of her booth Cathy sees the speaker step down, and removes her headphones.

When asked how she prepares for conferences, Cathy said: "When I'm sent outlines of the speeches in advance, I can look up every technical term beforehand. But this time, all I knew was that the topic was oil. So I've read around the subject to get familiar with the English technical terms."

Cathy was born in Britain to Russian parents. The family moved to France, then back to Britain, and Cathy grew up speaking Russian at home and first French, then English at school. After getting a degree in Russian, she did a six month postgraduate course in conference interpreting.

Applicants for the course spent a day doing aptitude and language tests. Of the students who got onto the course, only 50% passed their final diploma exams.

Most conference interpreters are freelance. Which organization they work for depends on the languages they offer.

Someone like Cathy, who interprets from Russian and French into English, will work for the UN in New York and Geneva, the World bank and UNESCO in Paris, NATO and the European Commission in Brussels, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Conference interpreters earn between £ 250 and £ 450 a day. "It varies according to where you're working, and how many of you there are. Usually there are two of us in the booth, taking turns. I'll interpret one speech, and then a colleague does the next. We work as a team because it's less stressful. This morning, whenever the speaker said figures, like $40,398,462 or 58,645 barrels of oil, my colleague jotted them down so I didn't have to memorize them."

She says you need to be able to think fast. At a recent conference Cathy was going into Russian-a very unusual situation. Interpreters only go into one language as a rule and Cathy' s "active" language is English, concluded with a Chinese proverb.

None of the interpreters could understand it. Thinking quickly, Cathy translated it into Russian as "the fork knows where the fish is."

Later she discovered the Spanish interpreter's version had been "the flea knows where the fur is" and the Arabic interpreter had turned it into "the feet know where the thistles are."

Since this experience, she has developed a range of enigmatic proverbs usable in almost every situation. She can now slot in without hesitation, in Russian or English, phrases like, "When the bird is building its nest, it cannot sing," "A bald man needs no comb," and "The sky knows where the stars are."

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